I found the article “#FollowFriday: A Tiny Shred Of
Political Authenticity” by Andrea Seabrook on the National Public Radio website.
NPR does a weekly article about Twitter they call #FollowFriday and this story
was from last Friday, May 25. The rather short story is about politicians
actually posting tweets on their Twitter accounts, not just letting an intern
do it for them.
Seabrook states that because she is so frustrated by this
she would like to list a few political figures that do in fact tweet themselves
on their Twitter accounts. The list includes Rep. Steve Isreal, Rep. Thad
McCotter, Rep. Sean Duffy, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Rep. Rush Holt.
Seabrook also states that Twitter is not the place for political figures to
pretend to tweet.
I think this relates to my final project because most of
those I follow on Twitter are politicians, actors, comedians or other famous
people because I don’t have a lot of friends that participate on Twitter. I,
being the completely trusting and unsuspecting person I am, thought that most
people, famous or otherwise, would like to make their own tweets not force it
upon others. Apparently I am too trusting.
This article helped to show me that I must be subjective
when studying what famous people tweet. I figured some people allowed others to
tweet for them but did not realize that it was such a great number or a big
enough problem for NPR journalists to write about.
This also relates to my final because Seabrook mentioned that
this behavior is not what Twitter is about. I have been having a hard time
understanding what the rules of etiquette are on Twitter. Most people post
anything they can think about on Facebook but I don’t think it is necessarily
okay to do so on Twitter. Twitter feels like it has a stricter set of rules for
socially acceptable tweets and it became rather apparent to me through this
article.
This article also calls into account how genuine people are
being. A large part of my project is in relating Twitter to Facebook because
Facebook is what I understand while Twitter I do not. I have found from
personal experience that people are rather lax about Facebook content. One does
not get called out for posting a lie or having someone else post for them. On
the other hand it appears that on Twitter one would be. This article has been a
great aid in furthering my understanding about the dynamic relationship between
Twitter users and their followers.
No comments:
Post a Comment